The Importance of Being Dangerous (21 page)

“She couldn't be wrong twice.” Sidarra smiled back. “Plus you felt it. Either way it's a comeback. You don't have to change into someone else to improve your life. A comeback is change, too.”

A natural grin grew across his face. “I like that,” he said, fully satisfied. “You on a comeback, sweetheart?”

“More than you know,” she admitted. Sidarra started to blush.

At first he had to look away. “All right, I have another question.” She waited. “How do you conceal your bounty?” Griff asked. The main course arrived.

She looked around the almost empty room. “What do you mean?” She giggled.

“Like, how do you show up at the Board of Ed in an S450 convertible and your fine vines without causing a civil service scandal?”

“Oh,” she laughed, “I thought you meant something else.” He'd said “bounty.” She heard “beauty.”

“Sidarra, I would never ask you to hide your booty.”

She giggled some more. “Okay, that stuff? Well, you have to be mysterious. I have a few strategies. Like I park in different places at lots nobody I work with parks at. Sometimes I park in this neighborhood and take the subway one stop over to Brooklyn. I bring a bag of clothes to change into.”

“Like a gym bag?”

“Now it's a gym bag, but that's not how it started. I was using a restaurant bathroom regularly for a while till it occurred to me I could just join a gym.” She sipped her wine and thought about other strategies to tell. “Sometimes I admire other people's clothes and deliberately call them by the wrong labels. It's gotten to be a pretty exciting game. I feel like Batwoman some days. You have to remember, for years I let a lot of people I work with think I was stupid. It would take a lot to change their minds now.” Griff
laughed almost out of his seat. “Well, what do
you
do?” she asked, the wine taking over and her smile shining big. “What about your booty? You got pretty things to hide.”

He laughed some more. “Not around here. My office is different. I'm a free agent, and the prosecutors all assume we're dirty anyway.” He took a bite of his swordfish fillet. “Buying the Full Count. Nobody knows about that but you, Koob, and Q.” Griff's face got serious again. “But to be honest, the person I conceal the most from is my wife. For her, it's what's on paper—she'd know in an instant—and by now there's a lot to hide, of course.”

Sidarra's guard immediately went up. “How can you say that? I thought she advises you.”

“That's what you thought, Sidarra? You thought I was bringing ideas from Belinda?” Griff laughed incredulously. “How 'bout that. Ye of so little faith. No, the only information I learn from Belinda I get from the things she leaves lying around. I never talk to her about investment options for me or the club. And the actual decisions”—he leaned across the table and held her eyes with his gaze—“that's just us, baby. If you've been thinking you had some secret investment-banker backup, think again. We take our own risks. We make our own gains.”

It was true that occasionally Sidarra had assuaged an investment doubt with the assumption that Griff was running a lot of ideas through Belinda, who after all was a stock insider, if not an expert. Now, the realization that Griff could be so secretive at home made her uncomfortable.

“I used to be pretty jealous of you, Griff, to tell you the truth. Now, I guess I have to say I'm a bit sorry for you,” she said gently. “Your home life's not so good, is it?”

He looked around, or maybe he just looked away. His eyes had some of the distance in them they had when he was being a statue man at the crosswalk. “No. If I were trying to hold on to a bad situation, I'd accept your pity. But, baby, this is the sign of a Sat
urn return: me. I think I've been preparing myself for a long time, and now, well,” he smiled broadly at her, “luck has a way of facilitating things. Belinda's going away, Sid.”

Sidarra stopped chewing her food and looked up. “What do you mean? Where's she going?”

“She's going to Japan on business. She can't say when her project will end there. She probably won't be back until the summer at least.” His face was resolute, but not sad, as if he was were waiting to take his cue from Sidarra.

“Well, um, how do you feel about it?”

Griff looked at Sidarra and measured his words. “I'm pretty damn cool with it, Sid. I've never been so relieved. I'm not gonna sit here and say that everything happens for a reason, but sometimes they do.”

Suddenly her body felt like it had to be someplace else, and she was taking him with her. “Please let me pay,” she said, waving down the fanatical waiter.

His face looked game. “Okay, but I had something else I wanted to tell you.”

“Let it wait,” she advised, hurrying them into their coats. And after paying, they walked out into the crisp chill of the late afternoon street.

They walked the downtown sidewalks arm in arm and slow, a pace so slow they sometimes wobbled. The two glasses of wine each drank helped. Giggles came easy. But their long strides matched, and their hips touched as they bumped paths again and again. When they were ready to resume speaking, Griff had forgotten what he wanted to tell Sidarra. So they asked about each other's favorite secret destination: Paris, France, she said; anywhere in Belize, he said. And Sidarra told him about the charter school she was thinking about starting, leaving the Board of Miseducation to go back to teaching. They laughed at the irony of the chancellor's position being taken over by a strong black woman
from outside the men's club of usual suspects. Strange that after waiting a dozen or more years for something like that, Sidarra might leave it as soon as it happened.

Yet it wasn't the talk anymore that mattered, but the temptation of an alley. The icy river, not far off, whispered privacy to them and they walked west. As they passed their reflections in Tribeca plate glass, navigated a patch of cobblestone, onstage beneath streetlamps, the city kept increasing the delight of finding themselves arm in arm at last with no meeting or pool game to go to.

They never made it to the river because a brick wall stopped them cold. “I gotta ask you something I never wanted to stoop to,” Griff said. Sidarra nodded. “How have you managed to be as breathtaking and thoughtful and sexy all these years and be without a man who would stand beside you and be done?”

“Be done?” she asked, loving the hell out of Griff's wine-induced syntax.

“Yes,” he said into her eyes. “Be done looking anywhere else, finished with himself as a man alone and ready to be a partner with an equal, done with all the bullshit that comes before, when a guy's not sure, and just get on with the honor of trying to be the equal to you. How'd you manage to miss that guy?”

“Well,” she laughed, and closed her arm tighter around his and took a step. “First I was stupid for a long time. I kicked a lot of men to the curb on general principle. I was stupid and unnecessarily mean. Then I became sad and fat, then just chubby and sad. After that I went on to being kind of skinny sad, and, as Mr. Harrison used to say, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” They both laughed and bent a little this way and that, but the alley wall behind her remained unmoved. “There is a man, though,” Sidarra finally admitted.

“Yeah?”

“His name is Michael. He's a bit older. He cares about me a
lot. I care about him too. He's a man that should have been a friend, Griff, in a world that offered too little else to me. I mean, we all have needs. I've never been in love with him; he knows that. But we've done the best we could over a couple of years now.”

Griff turned and leaned into the old brick of the Tribeca alley. “You've been a little lonely, huh?”

“But not today, baby.”

And that's when they knew to lean into each other's soft, ready lips and kiss. He held her head, she palmed his neck, and their coats opened to let each other's warm bodies closer for a great long kiss against the wall. They licked and tasted the delicacy of each other's gums and tongues and teeth. It was the first best kiss of adolescence again, perfected by decades of experience. It was what you couldn't know how to feel then finally happening now. And every time words, suggestions, or declarations came to each of their minds to say, they kept kissing. In time there was no wonder. It was clear what to do next.

Making love didn't need to be like her fantasy to be better than the dream, because it was both of their hopes pent up. It was her red room with the pillows and the shrine, not a pool table in a lounge. It was a weekday afternoon, not a forbidden late night. It was A1 Green singing playfully of love, not Marvin Gaye losing their minds. On the drive to Harlem, they held hands and grooved fingers. When they reached her home, they marched up the stairs with singular purpose, giggling, grabbing, and pulling each other upward by the hand. Sidarra was his simple goddess, the actual queen of his senses, and he swarmed her body with his hands, licking and teething her clothes off of her. The foreplay was all stumble, a mixed-up process of getting undressed with can't-wait passion and wet pressure points. As she nibbled his neck, Griff grew so hard, his penis much thicker and more marvelous in her hand than in her dream. Sidarra's curvaceous body rolled over and under him like an insistent tide. He lifted her into his arms and
hugged her against his naked body in waves, giggling long kisses into her mouth while looking for the right place to lay her down again. He wandered over her magnificence in search of thresholds to cross. Finally he lowered her gently down onto the sofa and inhaled at the sight of beautiful lingerie she had intended for no one but herself.

“So this is what you look like the other days of the week?”

“I often look like this on Tuesdays, but you never asked to see.”

He grinned mischievously. “May I?” he asked, and bent low over her pelvis.

“Do, baby. Do what you feel.”

Griff lifted her lower back to him from beneath and electrified her swollen vagina with his mouth. She moaned over the sounds of “You Ought to Be with Me.” Griff washed her and soaked her and bedeviled her with slow determination until they were sticky and hysterical, and she reached to pull him inside of her. Their eyes open and locked on each other, the deep meeting of their flesh overcame their breath. They held the gaze from less than an inch away as their lips slid across each other's, as she widened and as he grew. They rolled against the hilt back and forth again and again in long, then tight, then long, then harder strokes, until their flesh was fairly splashing, their mouths wide open for air, legs shaking and rocking to the frenzy of one full-body scream. Sidarra had just come a second time when Griff let go all his might within her. And they were spent.

Sidarra absorbed Griff's loving weight atop her body and listened to new songs play. Her eyes scanned the ceiling and traced the last lines of sunrays seeking the red walls. She held his butt cheeks until they stopped trembling against her. They lay filled up and tired. The truth felt like love, and she didn't dare live to see this truth reduced little by little to rumor someday. Her body decided to never let this man go. Her fingernails gently crisscrossed
the muscles on his back, her eyes stuck on heaven. She refused to calculate. She didn't care to reason. Aunt Chickie was plain wrong about love, but still, for Sidarra, to hear Griff say something now would mean the devastating power of simultaneous orgasms was no accident. She couldn't wait to know.

She didn't have to. As if he anticipated her question, Griff pulled his arms up so he could look back into her eyes, grind his torso a touch deeper inside her, and lay a kiss on the moist tip of her noise. “I want you to be clear about something, Sidarra,” he declared just above her face. “It's what I meant to tell you when you interrupted me to leave Odeon.”

What? her eyes said.

“I love you. I've loved you for a long time. That may not sit right with you. I'm not playing the angles here, though I know there are some. Feel that?”

Griff nudged his penis slightly inside her walls. It was still as hard as if he had never come. “I like that,” she said. “What
is
that?”

“My body backing up my words.”

“Okay,” she purred, and searched for her reflection in his eyes. “Okay, but tell me one more time.”

 

GRIFF STAYED INTO THE EARLY EVENING
with Sidarra upstairs on the third floor, walking naked together around the space and lounging to music in each other's arms. Raquel had lacrosse practice—Sidarra's concession to the skiing episode—and Aunt Chickie remained on the ground floor doing whatever she did down there. Sidarra lay back freely on a corner of the sofa and watched Griff wander across the things in the room. He stopped at her work area and took a step up the short platform.

“Koob wasn't kidding,” he said, pointing to the computer. “You never use your computer, do you?”

Sidarra closed her legs as if she were a bit embarrassed. “Not
often. I mean, I use it to keep track of a few things, you know, basically word processing. But I don't really know how to go online or anything. I'm gonna get around to e-mail one of these days. I really am.” Sidarra thought to herself, But I can remember the Control-86 Transfer Command, as if that meant something.

Griff chuckled quietly and continued walking the room. “The view is nice from here,” he said, pulling a drape back from the window and looking out.

She savored the long brown wing of his hard body as it became a silhouette in the remaining sunlight. “I'm sure my neighbors think so too.”

He stopped, forgetting that he was probably visible from the street. “No, I mean up here you're just above the roofs of the buildings across the street. You can see for miles.” His eyes continued to scan. Then they prowled the street, roaming back and forth until something to the left caught his eye. Griff squinted to be sure. Then he pulled back from the window and closed the drapes together. “We have a little problem,” he said with a whole new expression on his face.